107 Facts About Pancho Villa

Francisco "Pancho" Villa was a general in the Mexican Revolution.

Pancho Villa was a key figure in the revolutionary movement that forced out President Porfirio Diaz and brought Francisco I Madero to power in 1911.

Pancho Villa dominated the meeting of revolutionary generals that excluded Carranza and helped create a coalition government.

Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa became formal allies in this period.

Pancho Villa was decisively defeated by Constitutionalist General Alvaro Obregon in summer 1915, and the US aided Carranza directly against Pancho Villa in the Second Battle of Agua Prieta in November 1915.

Much of Pancho Villa's army left after his defeat on the battlefield and because of his lack of resources to buy arms and pay soldiers' salaries.

When Carranza was ousted from power in 1920, Pancho Villa negotiated an amnesty with interim President Adolfo de la Huerta and was given a landed estate, on the condition he retire from politics.

In life, Pancho Villa helped fashion his own image as an internationally known revolutionary hero, starring as himself in Hollywood films and giving interviews to foreign journalists, most notably John Reed.

Pancho Villa was celebrated during the Revolution and long afterward by corridos, films about his life, and novels by prominent writers.

Pancho Villa told a number of conflicting stories about his early life.

Pancho Villa's father was a sharecropper named Agustin Arango, and his mother was Micaela Arambula.

Pancho Villa grew up at the Rancho de la Coyotada, one of the largest haciendas in the state of Durango.

Pancho Villa quit school to help his mother after his father died, and worked as a sharecropper, muleskinner, butcher, bricklayer, and foreman for a US railway company.

In 1902, the rurales, the crack rural police force of President Porfirio Diaz, arrested Pancho Villa for stealing mules and for assault.

Pancho Villa was forcibly inducted into the Federal Army, a practice often adopted under the Diaz regime to deal with troublemakers.

Pancho Villa tried to work as a butcher in Hidalgo del Parro but was forced out of business by the Terrazas-Creel monopoly.

Pancho Villa was known to his friends as La Cucaracha or.

Until 1910, Pancho Villa is said to have alternated episodes of thievery with more legitimate pursuits.

At the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Pancho Villa was 32 years old.

Pancho Villa joined in the armed rebellion that Francisco Madero called for in 1910 to oust incumbent President Porfirio Diaz in the Plan de San Luis Potosi.

In Chihuahua, the leader of the anti-re-electionists, Abraham Gonzalez, reached out to Pancho Villa to join the movement.

Pancho Villa captured a large hacienda, then a train of Federal Army soldiers, and the town of San Andres.

Pancho Villa went on to beat the Federal Army in Naica, Camargo, and Pilar de Conchos, but lost at Tecolote.

Pancho Villa met in person with Madero in March 1911, as the struggle to oust Diaz was ongoing.

Madero rewarded Pancho Villa by promoting him to colonel in the revolutionary forces.

The rebel forces, including Pancho Villa, were demobilized, and Madero called on the men of action to return to civilian life.

Orozco and Pancho Villa demanded that hacienda land seized during the violence bringing Madero to power be distributed to revolutionary soldiers.

Pancho Villa strongly disapproved of Madero's decision to name Venustiano Carranza as his Minister of War.

At the request of Madero's chief political ally in the state, Chihuahua Governor Abraham Gonzalez, Pancho Villa returned to military service under Madero to fight the rebellion led by his former comrade Orozco.

Huerta then sought to discredit and eliminate Pancho Villa by accusing him of stealing a fine horse and calling him a bandit.

Pancho Villa struck Huerta, who then ordered Pancho Villa's execution for insubordination and theft.

Pancho Villa first was imprisoned in Belem Prison, in Mexico City.

Pancho Villa was transferred to the Santiago Tlatelolco Prison on 7 June 1912.

Pancho Villa escaped on Christmas Day 1912, crossing into the United States near Nogales, Arizona on 2 January 1913.

Pancho Villa had Abraham Gonzalez, governor of Chihuahua, Madero's ally and Villa's mentor, murdered in March 1913.

Pancho Villa proclaimed the Plan of Guadalupe to oust Huerta as an unconstitutional usurper.

Until Huerta's ouster, Pancho Villa joined with the revolutionary forces in the north under "First Chief" Carranza and his Plan of Guadalupe.

Pancho Villa considered Tierra Blanca, fought from 23 to 24 November 1913, his most spectacular victory, although General Talamantes died in the fighting.

Reed includes stories of Pancho Villa confiscating cattle, corn, and bullion and redistributing them to the poor.

Pancho Villa had even at some point kept a butcher's shop for the purpose of distributing to the poor the proceeds of his innumerable cattle raids.

Pancho Villa was a brilliant tactician on the battlefield, which translated to political support.

Pancho Villa printed his own currency and decreed that it could be traded and accepted at par with gold Mexican pesos.

Pancho Villa forced the wealthy to give loans to fund the revolutionary war machinery.

Pancho Villa confiscated gold from several banks, and in the case of the Banco Minero he held a member of the bank's owning family, the wealthy Terrazas clan, as a hostage until the location of the bank's hidden gold reserves was revealed.

Pancho Villa appropriated land owned by the hacendados and redistributed the money generated by the haciendas to fund military efforts and the pensions of citizens who had lost family members in the revolution.

Pancho Villa decreed that after the completion of the revolution the land would be redistributed, away from the hands of the oligarchy, to revolutionary veterans, former owners of the land from before the hacendados took the land, and the state itself in equal parts.

Pancho Villa recruited fighters from Chihuahua and Durango and created a large army known as the Division del Norte, the most powerful and feared military unit in all of Mexico.

Pancho Villa threatened to cut off Villa's coal supply, immobilizing his supply trains, if he did not comply.

Pancho Villa's enlisted men were not unpaid volunteers but paid soldiers, earning the then enormous sum of one peso per day.

Disgusted but having no practical alternative, Pancho Villa complied with Carranza's order and captured the less important city of Saltillo, and proceeded to give control of the land to Carranza in the hope of ending the hostility between the two.

Carranza refused to reach any compromise with Pancho Villa, and ordered that 5000 members of the Division del Norte be sent to Zacatecas to assist in its capture.

Pancho Villa believed that sending troops to assist would only lead to the same result unless he was to lead the attack himself.

Carranza declined to rescind the order as he did not want Pancho Villa to receive the credit as the victor of Zacatecas.

Pancho Villa accepted his staff's advice and cancelled his resignation, and the Division del Norte defied Carranza and attacked Zacatecas.

The Pact of Torreon, an agreement between the Division of the Northeast and Pancho Villa's Division of the North, was a stopgap to keep the Constitutionalists united prior to the defeat of the Federal Army.

Pancho Villa viewed Carranza as a soft civilian, while Pancho Villa's Division of the North was the largest and most successful revolutionary army.

Pancho Villa allowed Obregon to leave by train to Mexico City, but then Pancho Villa attempted to stop the train and bring Obregon back to Chihuahua.

In 1915, Pancho Villa was forced to abandon the capital after a number of incidents involving his troops, which helped pave the way for the return of Carranza and his followers.

In October 1915, Pancho Villa crossed into Sonora, the main stronghold of Obregon and Carranza's armies, where he hoped to crush Carranza's regime.

However, Carranza had reinforced Sonora, and Pancho Villa again was defeated badly.

Rodolfo Fierro, a loyal officer and cruel hatchet man, was killed while Pancho Villa's army was crossing into Sonora.

Only 200 men in Pancho Villa's army remained loyal to him, and he was forced to retreat back into the mountains of Chihuahua.

Pancho Villa's fighting force had shrunk significantly, no longer an army.

Pancho Villa's opponents believed him finished as a factor in the Revolution.

Pancho Villa decided to split his remaining forces into independent bands under his authority, ban soldaderas, and take to the hills as guerrillas.

Pancho Villa had loyal followers from western Chihuahua and northern Durango.

In Namiquipa, Pancho Villa sought to punish civilians who had formed a home guard, but when they learned Pancho Villa's men were approaching the village men took to the hills, leaving their families behind.

Pancho Villa was further enraged by Obregon's use of searchlights, powered by US generated electricity, to help repel a Villista night attack on the border town of Agua Prieta, Sonora on 1 November 1915.

Pancho Villa admitted to ordering the attack, but denied that he had authorized the shedding of blood of US citizens.

Pancho Villa then met with his lieutenants Martin Lopez, Pablo Lopez, Francisco Beltran, and Candelario Cervantes, and commissioned an additional 100 men to the command of Joaquin Alvarez, Bernabe Cifuentes, and Ernesto Rios.

On 9 March 1916, General Pancho Villa ordered nearly 100 Mexican members of his revolutionary group to make a cross-border attack against Columbus, New Mexico.

Pancho Villa eluded them, but some of his senior commanders, including Colonel Candelario Cervantes, General Francisco Beltran, Beltran's son, Pancho Villa's second-in-command Julio Cardenas, and a total of 190 of his men were killed during the expedition.

Pancho Villa was supplied arms from the US, employed international mercenaries and doctors including Americans, was portrayed as a hero in the US media, made business arrangements with Hollywood, and did not object to the 1914 US naval occupation of Veracruz.

Pancho Villa opposed the armed participation of the United States in Mexico, but he did not act against the Veracruz occupation in order to maintain the connections in the US that were necessary to buy American cartridges and other supplies.

The German consul in Torreon made entreaties to Pancho Villa, offering him arms and money to occupy the port and oil fields of Tampico to enable German ships to dock there, but Pancho Villa rejected the offer.

However, Pancho Villa's actions were hardly that of a German catspaw; rather, it appeared that Pancho Villa resorted to German assistance only after other sources of money and arms were cut off.

Pancho Villa was repulsed at Columbus by a small cavalry detachment, albeit after doing a lot of damage.

Pancho Villa was persona non grata with Mexico's ruling Carranza constitutionalists and was the subject of an embargo by the US, so communication or further shipments of arms between the Germans and Villa would have been difficult.

Pancho Villa effectively did not have anything useful to offer in exchange for German help at that point.

Pancho Villa's last major military action was a raid against Ciudad Juarez in 1919.

Pancho Villa continued fighting, and conducted a small siege in Ascencion, Durango, after his failed raid in Ciudad Juarez.

At this point Pancho Villa agreed that he would cease fighting if it were made worth his while.

On 21 May 1920, a break for Pancho Villa came when Carranza, along with his top advisers and supporters, was assassinated by supporters of Alvaro Obregon.

On 22 July 1920, Pancho Villa finally was able to send a telegram to Mexican interim President Adolfo de la Huerta, which stated that he recognized De la Huerta's presidency and requested amnesty.

Six days later, De la Huerta met with Pancho Villa and negotiated a peace settlement.

In exchange for his retirement from hostilities, Pancho Villa was granted a 25,000 acre hacienda in Canutillo, just outside Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua, by the national government.

The widow Corral did not want to seem a counter-revolutionary and went to Pancho Villa, who allowed her to make a token contribution to the cause.

Manuela Casas with whom Pancho Villa had a son named Trinidad Pancho Villa.

Pancho Villa became John Wayne's double in many movies in the state of Durango.

When Pancho Villa's remains were transferred in 1976 to the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, Corral refused to attend the huge ceremony.

Pancho Villa's last living son, Ernesto Nava, died in Castro Valley, California, at the age of 94 on 31 December 2009.

On 20 July 1923, Pancho Villa was assassinated in an ambush while visiting Parral, most likely on the orders of political enemies Plutarco Elias Calles and President Alvaro Obregon.

Pancho Villa frequently made trips from his ranch to Parral for banking and other errands, where he generally felt secure.

Pancho Villa usually was accompanied by his large entourage of armed Dorados, or bodyguards, but for some unknown reason on that day he had gone into the town without most of them, taking with him only three bodyguards and two other ranch employees.

Pancho Villa went to pick up a consignment of gold from the local bank with which to pay his Canutillo ranch staff.

The next day, Pancho Villa's funeral was held and thousands of his grieving supporters in Parral followed his casket to his burial site while Pancho Villa's men and his closest friends remained at the Canutillo hacienda armed and ready for an attack by the government troops.

Pancho Villa was likely assassinated because he was talking publicly about re-entering politics as the 1924 elections neared.

At the time, a state legislator from Durango, Jesus Salas Barraza, whom Pancho Villa once whipped during a quarrel over a woman, claimed sole responsibility for the plot.

The friend was not wealthy and did not have 50,000 pesos on hand, so he collected money from enemies of Pancho Villa and managed to collect a total of 100,000 pesos for Barraza and his other co-conspirators.

Pancho Villa was buried the day after his assassination in the city cemetery of Parral, Chihuahua, rather than in Chihuahua city, where he had built a mausoleum.

Pancho Villa's remains were reburied in the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City in 1976.

The Francisco Pancho Villa Museum is a museum dedicated to Pancho Villa located at the site of his assassination in Parral.

Pancho Villa's purported death mask was hidden at the Radford School in El Paso, Texas until the 1980s, when it was sent to the Historical Museum of the Mexican Revolution in Chihuahua.

Pancho Villa has relatively few sites in Mexico named for him.

Pancho Villa played a decisive role not just in the destruction of Huerta's regime, but the entire old regime.

Pancho Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico destroyed the burgeoning cooperation between the Carranza government and the United States, and goaded the US into invading northern Mexico.

Pancho Villa emphasizes Villa's bandit past, for whom the Revolution provided a change of title, not of occupation.